Siege mentality grips Wisconsin as organizers submit recall petitions

It seems it is always snowing when Wisconsin melts down into a big partisan battle, and that was the case Tuesday as workers with the liberal group United Wisconsin submitted boxes and boxes of petitions calling for a recall election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

The Dairy State is again deep in the throes of winter as the group’s workers — furious at the budget deal reached last year that limited collective bargaining and forced state employees to pay a portion of their health care — await the release of figures indicating how many signatures the Democratic-organized effort collected.

“This is a really proud moment for us…it’s not a party, this has been a really serious movement,” Lori Compas, the recall petition leader, said.

“I can’t believe we did it, but we did it! We got all the signatures,” Dave Solstice, a petition drive volunteer, said. “Now we just need people to vote when it’s on the ballot”

The group says it has collected double the 540,208 signatures required to force a recall — one-quarter of the general election vote that put Walker into office. Even though some of the signatures are expected to be invalidated and discarded, Wisconsin Democrats have the comfort of a surplus in their second effort in the past year to drive a recall effort.

“They have already driven one round of recalls for Republican state senators,” Wisconsin election law attorney Mike Wittenwyler told Fox News. “Whether you call it a test, training wheels whatever, I think people learned so that now when you get to this election and this recall process, the error rate is going to go down because they’ve gone through it once.”

The group needed to wait until Walker had been in office for one year before submitting the petitions that will likely force the state’s chief executive back onto the ballot as early as this summer.